‘Please…one moment…I Just need…one moment.’
Four droplets of rain fell lightly against a cutting of sail cloth, pulled taught over the flour cart of Helga Miller. The mass of clouds overhead burgeoned with rain and grew heavy as they approached. The morning was held in a sullen kind of mood, a greyness that lived in two states. The air shook with urgency of movement, whirling leaves spun chaotical across the glade and covered the grass in the detritus of an oncoming storm.
It was a rare soul who knew the truth of the world.
For a single second fate held its breath as for the first time in her life, Helga had heard a neatly brushed rat ask for a moment to catch its breath.
Sure, it was easy to imagine that they talked; that there was an intuited commonality within all rats allowing them to pass on location of cheeses and such. But hearing a rat actually squeak a word within the same fluency of language as your own could lead to quite the varied reaction.
The ignorers were a common sort; rats being rats meant that they couldn’t talk. Any sentences, such as, “ouch, that was my tail”, were only brought on by a stressful day and could be later remedied by a cup of peppermint tea and a good lie down. The fearful ones, well, they would just howl and stamp with madness, they would turn their tailless–from a rat’s perspective–tail and run away from the thing that they could no longer comprehend. There were praise-ers; the form a cult of religion-ers; the sheer variety of a person’s reactions would never cease to surprise a rat, and rodent-kind had long ago worked out that the experience of humans wasn’t really worth the bother.
But the least common reaction, the one that never failed to surprise Nine-bottles, were the accepters.
‘Your talking rat likes scones?’ asked Helga, with the nonplussed nature of a millstone.
Fate, exhaled.
‘He’s the inn’s accountant and he usually enjoys most things that I cook.’ said Myles, feeling an introduction to be prudent for a reason unknown to himself or to the natural obscurity of this situation, ‘Nine-bottles, this is our miller, Helga.’
‘Yes, hello Helga,’ the little rat puffed, ‘my cousin does your family’s finances.’
Now finally beginning to get his breath back, the accountant scrabbled to his feet and waved imploringly at Myles as if formality wasn’t currently important.
‘We have problems, Myles, big problems that I haven’t been able to process. We’ve been audited, there’s a tax-collector, Errol doesn’t own the inn anymore, I think they want to close it down.’
There were four points to the fretful rat’s squeaking that Myles had to internalise in a quick succession. Firstly, as a student of the Highwayman’s guild he was certainly aware of audits. There were piles of money in the world and the owners of those piles would probably like to count them every so often so that they didn’t shrink. But, for a Highwayman, the accounting of previously stolen goods seemed legally complicated, and so records were kept to a nebulous concept at best. Likewise, the tax-collectors of the city were aware of the guild, it was a self-important place where rich toffs held even richer grudges, and so they would go about their business by avoiding the guild whenever they were wearing a uniform: strictly as a matter of self-preservation of course.
It was the last point that struck the recently employed chef with the most clarity, and although he didn’t know who the “they” in Nine-bottles’s frantic explanation, he suddenly felt his hand reaching for a place on his belt where he used to wear a scabbard.
‘A tax-collector? Can they take away a building?’ Myles asked.
‘They can take away whatever they like if you don’t have a receipt for it.’ Nine-bottles squeaked in reply, sitting upon his haunch, and pulling at his whiskers as an outlet for his nervous energy. ‘I was going to visit the lawyer that lives in the Dryford’s barn, but…he’s an owl.’
Myles closed his eyes. His parents had always warned him against whimsy. Talking animals, bright red toadstools with miniature tea sets hidden underneath. Everything out here in the country felt picture-book pastel in an ominous kind of way. He imagined for a moment that he was one pipe smoking badger in an overcoat away from moving back to the city.
‘The Dryford’s is out past stone-wall creek*,’ he said, shaking the thought away, ‘it would have taken you hours to make it there.’
‘There’s no other option.’ Squeaked Nine-bottles.
‘I can’t go back to the guild.’ Myles worried.
‘If you two are done,’ interrupted Helga, who had been waiting for the chef and the accountant to calm themselves down enough for a reasonable conversation to continue, ‘I have given enough free rides to the friar from this inn that I suppose I can play the taxi driver again today. We should make the farm before dark if the road isn’t too muddy.’
~
The clock ticked with an irregular beat.
Clocks in the country were always said to run slow but Errol disagreed with the sentiment. He believed that clocks were in fact shy. That they would slow when watched, creeping forward as if under the gaze of a predator; ticking in barely noticeable increments then speeding toward the underbrush of the next hour when someone blinked.
But in the quiet of the tavern, Errol mused that his clock was doing its best to pretend that it was not a clock at all. There was a tock-tick wrongness to its movement and the otherwise silent nature of the room made its sound almost seem dizzy. It was as if there was a pressure that had begun to ferment within the anxiety of the normally stone-faced innkeeper.
‘Could I get you a drink?’ Errol asked the tax-collector in effort to break the dead-weighted silence.
‘No,’ she replied curtly.
‘A cup of tea?’ Errol tried again.
‘That is a drink.’
The dour air only darkened around the Tax-collector, Malissa DeGrand. It was as if she were a kettle, a furious kettle, one second away from boiling but never actually reaching its tell-tale whistle. The room waited; Errol pleaded for some way to break the silence outside of small talk. The clock gave up being watched and decided to skip forward to four O’clock.
There were four neat bells.
‘I’m sure that he’ll turn up soon. It’s not like Nine-bottles to miss a meal.’
‘I will wait until Eight and then retire to my paperwork. If your accountant does not appear by then, Mr. Grangly, well, the ink of this inn’s foreclosure will be dry, as it were.
~
The rain fell steadily now
Thick mud sloshed heavily underfoot as Helga pulled the cart across the slough and heaved against the dead-weight with determination. Many had tried to sell her a horse, told her that she would get stuck on the next bend. People believed that pulling a cart was no job for a girl and would never see the road that she had already travelled upon. Carts were easy, you could fix a cart. But a horse could take fright, it could fall lame. If you always took the easiest path there would be one day where you’d be stuck with a broken cart and a dead horse, and then you were stuck twice over. Helga knew that she was strong enough and with every step forward she proved that she was right.
Pulling to a stop, the young miller yelled out to her two passengers huddled underneath the sail cloth and extracted her boot from the slush of mud.
‘Dryford’s farm! You can take two bags up for me while you’re running to escape the rain. I need to sit down for a bit’
Nine-bottles scampered into a pocket of Myles’s coat before he had a chance to be rained on. Turning in the warmth, he kicked aside a handkerchief, and poked out his nose from underneath the pocket flap.
‘I’ll leave the flour to my friend with the thumbs. Myles, get me up to the barn and I’ll speak to Booker. He’ll help, he has to.’
‘Is he actually an owl?’ I thought that rats and owls weren’t much for business lunches.’ Myles asked as he struggled to walk along the rain-slicked path with two bags of flour and almost slipped upon the mud-covered steps. It was a soaking rain, a downfall that knocked the petals from flowers and filled the day with the urge to find somewhere dry.
‘The menu is usually a tricky subject,’ Nine-bottles squeaked loudly to be heard over the noise of the tumult, ‘but sometimes a lawyer needs an accountant. They’re good with books but they are miserable at balancing them. Booker owes my father for setting up his invoicing system.’
Distracted in trying to imagine how an owl would hold a quill, Myles ducked into the relative dry of the barn and gave his friend a moment to scamper up onto a hay bale.
‘I’ll wait for you at the cart,’ he said, still burdened by the heavy flour sacks, ‘If you need anything just call out.’
Screaming may be more likely, Nine-bottles thought as he looked up into the darkness of the loft. This was too much excitement for one day.
With a scrabble and a perilous moment of unbalance, the little rat made his was up toward the drumming of the tin roof and whatever waited for him in the rafters.
‘Booker?’ He called out, hoping selfishly that the owl wasn’t in. ‘It’s Nine-bottles from the Copperpot. I believe you knew my father.’
Two eyes became as beacons from an empty corner of the roof. A wooden knot, silken and lithe unfurled into the unmistakable shape of an owl, the creature regarding its visitor with absolute focus.
Nine-bottles gulped audibly.
‘Ahh, yes the bottles accountancy family. How is the Copperpot? I used to enjoy catching field mice your garden as a boy.’ The owl spoke with a sage’s rasp, its mottled brown feathers ruffled across its chest in laughter. It hooted in a cough and then hopped onto the floor of the loft as if to stand before its visitor. Stretching, the full breadth of Booker’s wingspan seemed to loom maliciously above Nine-bottles. Something primal the little rat’s blood screamed for him to run but the accountant in him held his legs frozen.
‘There’s a problem. We need a lawyer.’ he squeaked with a slight stutter of fear.
‘Oh!?’ Booker’s eyes somehow widened even further, ‘A problem with the accounts? I couldn’t believe that a bottles would run afoul of the tax collector’s incredulous glare. Been audited, have you?’
‘No,’ squeaked Nine-bottles curtly in reply, his pride shining past fright as the insinuation of poor accountancy was suggested, ‘the title deed is all wrong. It appears that the previous owner left without signing anything.’
‘Without signing anything you say? No vocal contracts? No evidence of a knowing nod? Even an underlined “yours now” painted on a wall is permissible if it has a name on it. Ownership is…flexible out here in the country.’
The owl’s statement was lead-lined and a flash of memory was kindled in Nine-bottle’s mind. There was a letter, a hurried letter of indefinite scrawl, but one that had been signed all the same. An idea formed in the memory’s ashes.
‘Booker, can a rat own property? I think that I’ve just worked out the third option.’
‘Third option?’ the owl turned its head in an exaggerated contemplation of which owls were uniquely qualified to perform.
‘We can win, lose, or we can find a way to reach stalemate. We just need to find a demon for that one.’
—
*An ambling creek flanked on both sides by a tightly packed stone wall.
The, impressively constructed, rural confusion was originally built by a Mr Sculthorpe (no first name), whose misapprehension over a body of water’s ability to run had led to his belief that it was therefore able to stand up and then wander around. He had chosen a wall for a barricade because although he knew that water was able to fall, he had never imagined that is was able to jump.
In later life Mr Sculthorpe suffered a mental breakdown while visiting a blowhole along the Garran coast.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 